Better Mona with a mustache than a urinal to introduce a post about a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Fun fact: if you pronounce the name of the painting in French, it sounds like you're saying "She has a hot ass." I beg your pardon!
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| "L.H.O.O.Q" (1930, replica after 1919 original) |
MoMA's curators take a chronological approach which establishes the French artist's bonafides from the outset. Already restless making traditional art in his early twenties, he painted this glowing radiologist, a childhood friend, with the aura of a supernatural healer. X-rays had been invented only 15 year before.
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| Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910) |
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| "Portrait of the Artist's Father" (1910) |
Duchamp did for players of his favorite game--for which he eventually abandoned art making--what he did for a nude descending a staircase a couple of years later. The latter caused a major brouhaha when the 1913 Armory Show (America's introduction to modern art) exhibited his painting. In both works, he blends Cubism with Futurism.
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| "Chess Players" (1911) |
Around the time the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Duchamp ditched oil painting and embraced "Readymades" which pretty much got the conceptual art ball rolling. Ordinary manufactured objects (never hand-made) like a bottle rack, considered his first Readymade, became art when one "chose" him and he signed it.
It chooses you, so to speak. If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved, bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art. The idea was to find an object that had no attraction whatsoever from the aesthetic angle.
Over three decades, he "produced" only thirteen Readymades, which also included "In Advance of the Broken Arm" (a snow shovel, 1915) and most famously, "Fountain" (a urinal, 1917). The latter literally broke the art world. The mustachioed Mona Lisa above fell into a different category, a "Rectified Readymade," because it required more "work" than a mere signature.
Duchamp left France for America in 1915, using the money he earned from the sale of three paintings at the Armory Show two years earlier. Much to his surprise and no doubt delight, New York greeted him as a celebrity. He even accepted a commission to paint in oil one last time, on a canvas sized to fit above a bookcase in his patron's library's. Three dimensional, with a protruding bottle brush, it also incorporates Readymade shadows and reflects Duchamp's often sarcastic wit: the French title may be short for "You annoy me" or "You bore me."
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| Tu m' (1918) |
Duchamp's Readymades were an early expression of Dada, an international "anti-art" movement that emerged from World War I. In New York, Duchamp met and collaborated with Man Ray on a motorized sculpture. Its testing nearly injured America's most prominent Dadaist which, a century later, would have made a good basis for an Onion headline.
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| "Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)" by Marcel Duchamp (1920) |
The two artists found themselves in Paris at the dawn of the Jazz Age, where Man Ray photographed Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego (and another French pun meaning "Eros, that's life"). Rrose already had appeared on the label for Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, an "Assisted Readymade." In 2009, a collector paid a cool $11.5 million for the perfume bottle which also appeared on the cover of the only issue of New York Dada ever published.
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| "Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy" by Man Ray (1923) |
My taste in art runs to the figurative, which accounts for the delight I took in an utterly unique homage that Florine Stettheimer paid to Rrose and her progenitor. It may very well be the only time a well-known 20th century artist painted another in drag. Duchamp frequently attended the avant garde salons hosted by the three unmarried Stettheimer sisters in their Upper West Side apartment, along with Francis Picabia and Marsden Hartley. He also helped ensure the legacy of the notoriously private Stettheimer who eschewed trying to sell her paintings: two years after her death in 1946, Duchamp curated a retrospective of her work at MoMA, which her will had stipulated should be destroyed, in perhaps the most Dada move of all! Alas, the New York Times review was more redolent of mid-century sexism than critical insight:
Florine Stettheimer's art pays its roguish, absurd, debonair and affectionately irreverent tribute to the smart New York world of the Twenties and Thirties. Much of it may be deemed inconsequential, when measured strictly as art, though all of it adds a kind of indispensable thistledown glitter to the period it adorns and reflects.
But the credibility conferred by the exhibit on her mostly unseen work made it possible for sister Ettie, her executor, to place it in other museums, where a now more enlightened culture continues to appreciate it.
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| "Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy" (1923) |
The Dada bros clearly had a blast in Paris. Drag or shaving cream--what's the diff?
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| Marcel Duchamp with Shaving Cream by Man Ray (1924) |
In some ways, Dada was like today's expiring photos. By the mid 1920s, Surrealism had supplanted it. But the always inventive Duchamp wasn't quite done. He shifted his focus to a forerunner of Op Art.
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| "Disks Bearing Spirals" (1923) |
In 1926, he and Man Ray produced a short film by creating disks with pen and ink, adding puns and spinning them on phonograph turntables. This one says: "Let us escape the bruises of the Eskimos who have exquisite words." With Anémic Cinéma --attributed to Rrose Sélavy, of course--MoMA acquired its first Duchamp in 1938. By then, the daddy of Dada was playing chess more often than creating new art (he played internationally and earned "master" status).
As hard as it is to believe now, Duchamp never really tried to earn money from the sale of his work, relying instead on his inheritance, teaching (he tutored Stettheimer in French) and serving as an art adviser and dealer. However, he did try marketing an invention, colorful "Rotoreliefs" that he trademarked, copyrighted and entered into a a 1935 inventor's fair competition. Priced at 15 francs (~$2.50) they probably would have been a hit during the Summer of Love. Although Duchamp failed to earn his investment back on an initial edition of 500, he won an honorable mention at the fair.
By then, Duchamp was nearly 50. But instead of suffering a midlife crisis, he declared "Everything important that I have done... can be put into a small suitcase" and set about proving it. From 1935 to 1941, he assembled 69 miniature reproductions of his artistic oeuvre to date, essentially curating his own retrospective before any museums had decided he was worth collecting (the phrase "fiddling while Rome burned" comes to mind, legacy caretaking does seem particularly critical when it comes to conceptual art).
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| Reproductions for Box in a Valise |
After Duchamp immigrated to the United States in 1942, Peggy Guggenheim exhibited what Duchamp called a "Box in a Valise" at her Art of this Century gallery in New York City, where he told Alexander Calder that he should call his hanging constructions "mobiles," a name that stuck.
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| Series C |
When I learned that Duchamp produced more than 300 of these boxes over the remainder of his lifetime, enlisting the help of people like Joseph Cornell, I was reminded of the Ford Motor Company's assembly line and Andy Warhol's Factory but who knew that Marcel Duchamp was the bridge between the two?
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| Series F |
However you want to tag Duchamp--as the father of conceptual art or the daddy of Dada--one thing remains absolutely certain: he was a master networker. Alexander Liberman, the big cheese at Condé Nast, commissioned Duchamp to design a Vogue cover celebrating Americana in 1943. He submitted something that resembled George Washington vertically but became a map of the United States when turned horizontally (one can only imagine what he might have come up with for our semiquincentennial). Liberman said no way, but the Duchamp's assemblage found a home at VVV, a Surrealist magazine the following year.
MoMA has filled an entire gallery with replicas of Duchamp's most famous works.
The exhibit ends with a delightful surprise: two years before his death at the age of 66, Duchamp sat for one of Warhol's famous "Screen Tests." He definitely looks like he's in on the joke.
He probably would have appreciated the chess boards just outside the exhibit, too.
He famously played a match at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 with Eve Babitz, a California babe who would eventually become frenemies with Joan Didion.
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| Photo by Julian Wasser |
I also checked out Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, the museum's first collab ever with the New York Metropolitan Opera. Works of both artists from MoMA's collection are exhibited in a gallery conceived by the set and co-costume designer for El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego which premiered at the Met last spring.
Frida name checks Ford in this early, unfamiliar work. Check our the letters on the four smokestacks beneath the American flag.
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| "Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States" (1932) |
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| "Tree of Hope, Remain Strong" by Frida Kahlo (1946) |
I'm guessing this must be the tree opera fans see on stage at the Met.
As much as I enjoy Frida's narcissism, I also feel like Diego gets short shrift after a visit to Mexico City where seeing his frescoes, murals and Mesoamerican art collection were revelatory.
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| Self-Portrait, 1930 |
He's represented in this exhibit by his costume and set designs for H.P. (Caballos de vapor), the ballet-symphony completed by Carlos Chávez in 1936.
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